Maud Martha

That train—a sort of double-deck bus affair, traveling in a blue-lined half dark. Slow, that traveling. Slow. More like a boat. It came to a stop before the gorilla’s cage. The gorilla, lying on its back, his arms under his head, one leg resting casually across the other, watched the people. Then he rose, lumbered over to the door of his cage, peered, clawed at his bars, shook his bars. All the people on the lower deck climbed to the upper deck.

But why would they not get off?

“Motor trouble! Called the conductor. “Motor trouble! And the gorilla, they think, will escape!”

She did not know what it was. She had tried to find the something that must be there to imitate, that she might imitate it. But she did not know what it was. I wash as much as Helen does, she thought. My hair is longer and thicker, she thought. I’m much smarter. I read books and newspapers and old folks like to talk with me, she thought.

But the kernel of the matter was that, in spite of these things, she was poor, and Helen was still the ranking queen, not only with the Emmanuels of the world, but even with their father—their mother—their brother. She did not blame the family. It was not their fault. She understood. They could not help it. They were enslaved, were fascinated, and they were not at all to blame.

[Often] had Helen given her opinion, unasked, of the whole house, of the whole “hulk of rotten wood.” Often had her cool and gentle eyes sneered, gently and coolly, at her father’s determination to hold his poor estate! But take that kitchen, for instance! Maud Martha, taking it, saw herself there, up and down her seventeen years, eating apples after school; making sweet potato tarts; drawing, on the pathetic table, the horse that won her the sixth-grade prize; getting her hair curled for her first party, at that stove; washing dishes by summer twilight, with the back door wide open; making cheese and peanut butter sandwiches for a picnic. And even, crying, crying in that pantry, when no one knew. The old sorrows brought there!—now dried, flattened out, breaking into interesting dust at the merest look….

But I am certainly not what he would call pretty. Even with all this hair (which I have just assured him, in response to his question, is not “natural,” is not good grade or anything like good grade) even with whatever I have that puts a dimple in his heart, even with these nice ears, I am still, definitely, not what he can call pretty. Pretty would be a little cream-colored thing with curly hair. Or at the very lowest pretty would be a little curly-haired thing the color of cocoa with a lot of milk in it. Whereas, I am the color of cocoa straight, if you can even be that “kind” to me.

Still, mused Maud Martha, I am what he would call—sweet, and I am good, and he will marry me. Although, he will be thinking, that’s what he always says about letting yourself get interested in these incorruptible virgins, that so often your manhood will not let you concede defeat, and before you know it, you have let them steal you, put an end, perhaps, to your career.

He will fight, of course. He will decide that he must think a long time before he lets it happen here.

But in the end I’ll hook him, even while he’s wondering how this marriage will cramp him or pinch at him—at him, admirer of the gay life, spiffy clothes, beautiful yellow girls, natural hair, smooth cars, jewels, night clubs, cocktail lounges, class.

And these things—roaches, and having to be satisfied with the place as it was—were not the only annoyances that had to be reckoned with. She was becoming aware of an oddness in color and sound and smell about her, the color and sound and smell of the kitchenette building. The color was gray, and the smell and sound had taken on a suggestion of the properties of color, and impressed one as gray, too. The sobbings, the frustrations, the small hates, the large and ugly hates, the little pushing-through love, the boredom, that came to her from behind those walls (some of them beaver-board) via speech and scream and sigh—all these were gray. And the smells of various types of sweat and of bathing and bodily functions […] and of fresh or stale love-making, which rushed in thick fumes to your nostrils as you walked down the hall—these were gray.

Maud Martha was so glad that they had not gone to the Owl! Here was technicolor, and the love story was sweet. And there was classical music that silvered its way into you and made your back cold. And the theater itself! It was no palace, no such Great Shakes as the Trivoli out south, for instance (where many colored people went every night). But you felt good sitting there, yes, good, and as if, when you left it, you would be going home to a sweet-smelling apartment with flowers on little gleaming tables; and wonderful silver on night-blue velvet, in chests; and crackly sheets; and lace spreads on such beds as you saw at Marshall Field’s. Instead of back to your kit’n’t apt., with the garbage of your floor’s families in a big can just outside your door […]

“It’s not,” thought Maud Martha, “that they love each other. It oughta be that simple. Then I could lick it. It oughta be that easy. But it’s my color that makes him mad. I try to shut my eyes to that, but it’s no good. What I am inside, what is really me, he likes okay. But he keeps looking at my color, which is like a wall. He has to jump over it in order to meet and touch what I’ve got for him. He has to jump away up high in order to see it. He gets awful tired of all that jumping.”

[…]

“I could, considered Maud Martha, “go over there and scratch her upsweep down. […] I could scream, ‘I’m making a baby for this man and I mean to do it in peace.’”

But if the root was sour what business did she have up there hacking at a leaf?

The one-roomer next to the Whitestripes was occupied by Maryginia Washington, a maiden of sixty-eight, or sixty-nine, or seventy, a becrutched, gnarled, bleached lemon with smartly bobbed white hair; who claimed, and proudly, to be an “indirect” descendant of the first President of the United States; who loathed the darker members of her race but did rather enjoy playing the grand dame, a hobbling, denture-clacking version, for their benefit, while they played, at least in her imagination, Topsys—and did rather enjoy advising them, from time to time, to apply lightening creams to the horror of their flesh—“because they ain’t no sense in lookin’ any worser’n you have to, is they, dearie?”

“You know, why I didn’t catch her up on that, is—our people is got to stop feeling so sensitive about these words like ‘nigger’ and such. I often think about this, and how these words like ‘nigger’ don’t mean to some of these here white people what our people think they mean. Now, ‘nigger,’ for instance, means to them something bad, or slavey-like, or low. They don’t mean anything against me. I’m a Negro, not a ‘nigger.’ Now, a white man can be a ‘nigger,’ according to their definition of the word, just like colored man can. So why should I go getting all stepped up about a thing like that? Our people is got to stop getting all stepped up about every little thing, especially when it don’t among to nothing….”

She smiled at Maud Martha. When she looked at Maud Martha, it was as if God looked; it was as if—

“Now just how much, Madam, had you thought you would prefer to pay?”

“Not a cent over five.”

“Five? Five, dearie? You expect to buy a hat like this for five dollars? This, this straw hat that you can’t even get any more and which I showed you only because you looked like a lady of taste who could appreciate a good value?”

“Well,” said Maud Martha, “thank you.” She opened the door.

“Wait, wait,” shrieked the hat woman. Good-naturedly, the escaping customer hesitated. “Just a moment,” ordered the hat woman coldly. “I’ll speak to the—to the owner. He might be willing to make some slight reduction […]”

There was no introduction, but the elder Burns-Cooper boomed, “Those potato parings are entirely too thick!”

There was no remonstrance; no firing! They just looked. But for the first time, she understood what Paul endured daily. For so—she could gather from a Paul-word here, a Paul-curse there—his Boss! when, squared, upright, terribly upright, superior to the President, commander of the world, he wished to underline Paul’s lacks, to indicate soft shock, controlled incredulity. As his boss looked at Paul, so these people looked at her. As though she were a child, a ridiculous one, and one that ought to be given a little shaking, except that shaking was—not quite the thing, would not quite do. One held up one’s finger (if one did anything), cocked one’s head, was arch. AS in the old song, one hinted, “Tut tut! Now now! Come come!” Metal rose, all built, in one’s eye.